Remember the O.J. Simpson trial? Of course you do. After all, it was the Trial of the Century. The twentieth century, that is. In the dim and distant past of the early 1990s, when the Internet was barely a gleam in the eye of some basement-dwelling, ramen-eating nerd, the murder trial became arguably the first 24-hour news event. The media furor around the case combined the tawdriness of Reality Television and the gossip-mongering and instant buzzability of Twitter. If you’re too young to remember it, you may wonder why all the grown-ups you know are both relishing and dreading Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson.
For those of us who like our cheese firm, strong and stinky, the miniseries ticks all the requirements. There will be dramatic reenactments of infamous events, and a retelling of the trial’s more notorious moments, and enough soap opera moments to make us think we’re back in the halcyon days of Dallas and Dynasty. And good God, what a cast! John Travolta as Robert Shapiro. David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian (yes, of those Kardashians). Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran. And Cuba Gooding, Jr. as the man himself: athlete, actor, and occasional glove model O.J. Simpson.
